ROCKFORD — Aldermen may lift the city’s ban against residents housing and feeding wild animals to allow licensed wildlife rehabilitators to continue their work with a permit.

After a brief discussion tonight, members of the City Council Code and Regulation Committee asked the city’s staff to draft an amendment to the city’s code of ordinances that let wildlife rescuers nurse baby raccoons and squirrels and the like for up to 120 days before they are released at designated and approved release sites.

The vote was 5-1 with Ald. Bill Timm, R-9, voting no.

The committee is poised to review the draft amendment next week. The next step would be forwarding the proposal to the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals, which would hold a hearing, make a recommendation and send the matter back to the Code and Regulation Committee and eventually the council for final approval.

Several wildlife rehabilitation volunteers and Karen Herdklotz, director of “Hoo” Haven, a wildlife rehabilitation and education center in Durand, left the meeting pleased with the outcome.

“I believe that the City Council has been very gracious, very open. I have a very positive feeling,” Herdklotz said. “Everyone here that does rehab does everything out of their own pocket. ... Somebody who doesn’t like animals might go, ‘big deal.’ The fact of the matter is if you don’t have somebody that will take the babies, you’re going to have the very thing you don’t want. You’re going to have people taking in a baby raccoon or baby squirrel and keeping it in their home until it bites someone.”

There are about 200 licensed wildlife rehabilitation volunteers in the state, said Todd Cagnoni, deputy director of the city’s Community and Economic Development Department. There are about six in Rockford.

In his research on wildlife rehabilitation in the past week, Cagnoni said, he

learned that some communities in the state allow it and some do not.

The need for volunteers to take baby raccoons in the area has increased since 2004, Herdklotz said, which is when “Hoo” Haven became an eagle recovery center for Illinois, southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa and no longer accepted raccoons.

“When we get calls about raccoons, we call one of the individuals we know that does wildlife rehab,” she said. In most cases, the baby animals have been separated from their mother or are sick or injured. They need to be nursed back to health in order to survive.”

Ald. Tim Durkee, R-1, recommended crafting an exception in the city’s rules for the wildlife rehabilitators.

“I think it’s a good service,” Durkee said. “As humans, we should be stewards of wildlife. These folks are doing it at their own expense. They’re not doing it unsupervised. Everything is through the (Illinois Department of Natural Resources).”

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The new ordinance would not let the wildlife volunteers keep the animals as pets. They have to be kept in cages, Durkee said, and released back into the wild only at designated places.